FARD fucus, pigmentum refers to any composition, either white or red, which women and even some men use to improve their complexion, imitate the colors of youth, or compensate for them by artifice.

The name fard , fucus used to be even more broad than it is today, and was a particular art that was called commotiké , κωμμοτικὴ, in other words the art of make-up, which included not only all the kinds of make-up, but also all the medications that served to remove, conceal, or correct corporal deformities; and it is this last part of the former commotiké which we call orthopedics . See Orthopedics.

The love of beauty has from time immemorial inspired all the means that have been thought proper to increase its appeal, make it last longer, or cover its fissures, and women in whom the pleasure of charm extends very far have believed they found these means in face-painting [ fardements ], if I may use that old collective term, more energetic than fard .

The author of the book of Enoch [1] assures us that before the Flood, the angel Azaliel [2] taught girls the art of make-up, from which one can at least infer that this practice was ancient.

Antimony is the oldest fard mentioned in history, and at the same time the one which has enjoyed the most favor. Job, ch. xl v.14 , sufficiently indicates the value it had by giving one of his daughters the name of vase of antimony or casket for keeping fard, cornu stibii . [3]

As large, black, deep-set eyes passed in the Orient, as in France today, as the most beautiful, women set on charm rubbed a needle dipped in fard of antimony around the eye to extend the eyelash, or rather to curl it so the eye would appear larger. Thus Isaiah, ch. III v. 22 , in the list it makes of the ornaments of the daughters of Zion, does not forget the needles they used to paint their eyes and eyelids. [4] The style was so common that we read in one of the books of Kings, book IV, ch. ix, v. 30 , that Jezebel, having learned of the arrival of Jehu in Samaria, put her eyes in antimony, or plunged them into fard , as the Scripture puts it, to speak to that usurper and appear before him. Jeremiah, ch. iv v. 50 , never ceased crying to the daughters of Judea: In vain will you dress in purple and don golden necklaces, in vain will you paint your eyes with antimony, your lovers will scorn you . [5] The daughters of Judea did not believe the prophet; they still thought his oracles were mistaken; in a word, nothing could make them relinquish their fard . That is why Ezekiel, ch. xxiii, v. 40 , revealing the disorders of the Jewish nation in the guise of a courtesan, says that she bathed, put on perfume, and painted her eyes with antimony; that she sat down on a very fine bed and before a well-appointed table , etc. [6]

This use of fard made with antimony did not end with the daughters of Zion; it slipped in, spread, and perpetuated itself everywhere. We find that Tertullian and St. Cyprian in their turn declaimed most emphatically against the custom current in their time in Africa of painting the eyes and eyebrows with fard of antimony: inunge oculos tuos, non stibio diaboli, sea collyrio Christi , cried St Cyprian. [7]

What is singular is that today Syrian, Babylonian, and Arab women blacken around their eyes with the same fard , and that men do the same in the deserts of Arabia to protect their eyes from the intensity of the sun. See Tavernier, Travel to Persia, book ii, ch vii , [8] and Gabriel Sionita, De moribus orient, ch. xi . [9] Mr. d’Arvieux, in his voyages printed in Paris in 1717, book xii, p. 27 , remarks, speaking of Arab women, that they ring their eyes with a black coloring made with tutty, and that they draw a line of this black away from the corner of the eye to make it look more deeply set.  [10]

Since the travels of Mr. d’Arvieux, the learned Mr. Shaw relates in his own travels in Barbary, [11] with respect to the women of those parts, that they would think their ornaments were missing something if they had not colored their eyelashes and their eyes with what is called al-co-hol [kohl], which is the powder of lead ore. This operation is carried out by moistening a small wooden stylus the width of a feather in this powder and then passing it between the eyelids: they are convinced that the dark color they impart to the eyes in this way has a most pleasant effect on the faces of all kinds of persons.

Among other baubles of Egyptian women, the English traveler adds, I have seen them take a piece of ordinary reed from the catacombs of Sakara containing a stylus of the same kind as those of the women of Barbary [ Barbaresques ], and one ounce of the same powder as is still used (1740) in that land for the same purpose.

Greek and Roman women borrowed from Asian women the custom of painting their eyes with antimony; but to extend even farther the reign of beauty and restore faded colors they imagined two new fards unknown in the world, and which have come down to us: I refer to white and red. That is why poets feigned that the whiteness of Europe only came to it because one of the daughters of Juno had stolen the little vial of the goddess’s white fard , and made a present of it to the daughter of Agenor. When wealth flowed into Rome it brought frightful luxury: gallantry introduced the most refined researches in this domain, and the general corruption put its seal on it.

What Juvenal tells us of the bapses of Athens, those effeminate priests whom he admits to the mysteries of the toilet, should be understood for the Roman ladies, upon whose example those of whom the poet means to speak applied white and red, fastened their long hair with a golden cord, and blackened their eyebrows by turning them into a half-round with a hairpin. [12]

Our ladies, says Pliny the naturalist, put on makeup by affectation even to the eyes, tanta est decoris affectatio, ut tingantur oculi quoque ; but that was a mere suggestion of their languorousness.

They went from their beds into magnificent baths, and after that used pumice to polish and soften their skin, and they had twenty kinds of official slaves for that purpose. After this lascivious cleansing came anointing and the perfumes of Assyria; finally, the face was the object of no fewer procedures and ornaments than the rest of the body.

In Ovid we have detailed recipes for fards which in his times he recommended to Roman ladies; I say to Roman ladies, for white and red makeup were reserved to women of quality in the reign of Augustus; courtesans and freed women did not yet dare put any on. So take some of the barley, he told them, which the laborers in Libya send here; remove the straw and the covering, take an equal quantity of ers or orobe , both moistened in eggs, in proportion; dry it all and grind it; add some deer’s horn powder; add to that a few narcissus bulbs; pound the whole in a mortise; finally, you will add some gum and Tuscan wheat flour; bind it all with a suitable amount of honey. She who uses this makeup, he adds, will have a complexion clearer than the glass in her mirror.

But they soon invented a recipe simpler than Ovid’s, and one which had the greatest vogue. It was a fard made of soil from Chios or Samos which was dissolved in vinegar. Horace calls it humida creta [moist chalk]. Pliny tells us that ladies used it to whiten their skin, as they did with the soil of Selinuse, which is, he says, white as milk, and which dissolves easily in water. Fabula, according to Martial, feared rain because of the chalk on her face: it was one of the kinds of soil of which we have just spoken. And Petronius, portraying an effeminate man, expresses himself thus: Perfluebant per frontem sudantis acaciæ rivi, et inter rugas malarum, tantùm erat cretæ, ut putares detractum parietem nimbo laborare : “Streams of gum flowed on his face with the sweat, and the chalk was so thick in the wrinkles of his cheeks that you would have said he was a wall where the rain had washed away the whitewash.”

Poppaea, that famous courtesan, endowed with all the charms of her sex except chastity, used a sort of oily fard on her face, which formed a durable crust, and fell off only after being washed with a large amount of milk, which detached it into parts, revealing extreme whiteness; Poppaea, I say, made this new makeup popular, gave it her name, Poppæana pingicia , and used it even in her exile, where she had a flock of she-asses sent with her, and is said to have appeared with that cortege, says Juvenal, all the way to the Hyperborean pole.

This paste of Poppaea’s invention, which covered the whole face, formed a mask with which the women went about in the interior of their house: that was, so to speak, the domestic face, and the only one known to her husband. His lips, if we believe Juvenal, got stuck to it:

This fresh look, this bright complexion, was made only for the lovers; and that way, adds abbé Nadal, [16] nature gave nothing, neither to the ones nor to the others.

For rouge, reports Pliny, Roman ladies used a kind of fucus that was a Syrian root used for dying wool. But here Theophrastus is more precise than the Roman naturalist: the Greeks, according to him, called fucus everything that could paint flesh, whereas the particular substance which the women used to paint their cheeks red was distinguished by the name of rizion , a root brought from Syria into Greece for that purpose. The Latins, in imitation of the Greek term, called that plant radicula , and Pliny confused it with the root they used to dye wool.

It is so true that the word fucus was a general term to designate fard that the Greeks and Romans had a metallic fucus which they used for the white and which was nothing other than the ceruse or white lead of our women who market used clothing. [17] Their red fucus was made from the root rizion , and its sole use was to redden cheeks; subsequently they also used it for their white paint, from a fucus composed from a sort of Argentine chalk; and for rouge purpurite , a preparation they made with purple slime when it was still hot. See Purple ( Shell ). [18]

That is enough about Greek and Roman ladies. Let us now pursue the history of fard to our time, and prove that most of the peoples of Asia and Africa are still in the habit of coloring various parts of the body in black, white, red, blue, yellow, green – in a word with all sorts of colors, according to the notions they have formed of beauty. Egoism and vanity are equally pursued in all countries of the world; example, period and place only make for more or less harmony, taste, and perfection.

Beginning with the north, we learn that before the Muscovites were civilized by Czar Peter I, Russian women already knew how to wear rouge, pluck their eyebrows, and paint them or make artificial ones. We also see that Greenlandic women [19] daubed their faces with white and yellow; that the Zemblian women, to lend themselves charm, make blue stripes on the forehead and chin. Aging Mingrelian women paint their whole face, eyebrows, forehead, nose, and cheeks. Japanese women of Jedo color their eyebrows and lips blue. The island women of Sombreo north of Nicobar plaster their faces in green and yellow. Some women in the realm of Decan have flowers cut into their flesh and tint the flowers in various colors with juice from the roots of their country.

The Arabs, beyond what I have said above, are in the habit of applying a blue color to their arms, lips, and most exposed parts of the body; men and women apply this color in dots and make it enter into the flesh with a special needle; its mark is indelible.

Turkish women in Africa inject prepared tutty [20] into their eyes to make them blacker, and dye their hair, hands, and feet in yellow and red. Moorish women follow the style of Turkish women, but they dye only the eyebrows and eyelids with white lead powder. The girls who live on the borders of Tunis smear their chin and lips with blue color; some of them press a small flower onto some other part of the face with gall smoke and saffron. The women of the realm of Tripoli make the charms of their faces consist of pinpricks on the face which they dot with vermillion; they paint their hair in the same way. Most of the negro girls of Senegal have their skin embroidered before they are married with different figures of animals and flowers of all colors. The negresses of Sierra Leone ring their eyes in white, yellow, and red.

The Floridians of North America paint their bodies, faces, arms, and legs in all sorts of colors that are indelible because they have been imprinted in the flesh by means of pinpricks. Finally, the savage Caribs smear their whole face with roucou. [21]

To return to Europe, we find that white and red have prospered in France. We owe that to the Italians who came through the court of Catherine de’ Medici; but it was only at the end of the last century that the habit of rouge became generalized among women of quality.

Callimachus, in the anthem entitled The Bath of Pallas , spoke of a very simple fard . The two goddesses Venus and Pallas were competing for the prize and glory of beauty. Venus was long at her toilet; she was forever checking in her mirror, more than once retouched her hair, and adjusted the brightness of her complexion; whereas Minerva studied herself neither in metal, nor in ice on the water, and found no better secret for acquiring some bloom than to take a long run, like the girls of Lacedaemon [Sparta] who were in the habit of exercising by running along the Eurotas. If the outcome then justified Venus’s precautions, was it not rather the fault of the judge than of nature?

In any event, I do not think one can repair the ravages of time by dint of art, nor re-establish on top of facial wrinkles beauty that has gone away. I appreciate the justice of Rica’s reflections in his letter to Usbek: “women who feel themselves declining in advance by the loss of their attractiveness would like to retreat toward youth. Now why would they not try to fool others when they make every effort to fool themselves and evade the most unpleasant of all thoughts?” [22] But as La Fontaine says:

Yet far from producing this effect, I dare assert that fard s on the contrary ruin the skin, wrinkle it, alter and wreck the face’s natural color; I add that there few fard s in the range of whites that are not dangerous. Thus women who use oil of talc [24] as an excellent fard are quite mistaken; nor are those who use ceruse, lead white, or Spanish whiting doing themselves more of a favor; those who use preparations of sublimate are compromising their health even more; finally, the continual use of rouge, especially of that terrible vermillion that yellows everything around it, is not unproblematic for the skin. See Rouge.

Afranius often repeated, and rightly so, on this subject: “simple, natural charms, the rouge of modesty, cheerfulness, and kindness: these are the most alluring fard of youth; for old age, there is no fard that can beautify it except for wit and knowledge.”

I know of no book on fards ; I have read only that Michel Nostradamus, that physician so famous for the visits and presents he received from kings and queens, and for his centuries that gave him the reputation of a visionary, fool, magician, and heathen, produced in 1552 a treatise on paintings and aromas which I have never been able to find, and is perhaps not much to be regretted.  [25]

1. The name of Hebrew apocryphal, apocalyptic books with a complicated history, not part of any major canon of the Hebrew Bible. Enoch the man, great-grandfather of Noah, is mentioned in Genesis 5:22–29.

2. The reference is to Azazel, a fallen angel who appears at numerous points in the books of Enoch.

3. Actually Job 42:14. The Port-Royal Bible (1657–1696) mainly by Lemaistre de Sacy, calls her “Vase de parfum.” Stibium (Sb) is the Latin name and symbol of the element antimony.

4. They are called “crisping pins” in the King James version; “poinçons de diamants” according to Lemaistre de Sacy.

5. Actually IV Kings (in the Protestant Bible, II Kings) 4:30. In the King James: “[...] though thou rentest thy face with painting, in vain shalt thou make thyself fair; thy lovers will despise thee”; Lemaistre de Sacy puts it: “[...] que vous vous peindriez le visage avec du vermillion [...].”

6. Ezekiel 23:40–41; in the King James: “[...] thou didst wash thyself, paintedst thy eyes, and deckedst thyself with ornaments, and satest upon a stately bed, and a table prepared before it, whereupon thou hast set mine incense and mine oil”; Lemaistre de Sacy: “vous avez mis du fard sur votre visage.”

7. ‘Anoint your eyes, not with the devil’s antimony, but with the balm of Christ’ ( De Opere et Eleemosynis ).

8. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, chevalier baron d’Aubonne, qu’il a fait en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes, pendant l’espace de quarante ans, et par toutes les routes que l’on peut tenir (Paris, 1676-77).

9. Gabriel Sionita (1577-1648) was a learned Maronite who died in Paris in 1648.

10. Laurent d’Arvieux, Voyage dans la Palestine (Paris: André Cailleau, 1717), 261. According to Trévoux , tutie is another name for spode , ‘zinc calcinated with fire and reduced to a light ash which like suet lines the furnaces where zinc is treated. It is a dessicant remedy used in diseases of the eyes” (art. “Spode”). According to Collins, tutty is a “finely powdered impure zinc oxide obtained from the flues of zinc-smelting furnaces and used as a polishing powder.” The word comes into English from Arabic and probably Persian, via Old French.

11. The reference is to Thomas Shaw (1694-1751), Travels, or Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant (Oxford, 1738). He discusses the use of kohl on pp. 294-95.

12. Beginning with this paragraph, several Latin quotations and much of the discussion is taken verbatim from an article by abbé Nadal, “Du luxe des dames romaines,” in Mémoires de litérature tirés des registres de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres , 1711–1717 , vol. IV (1723), pp. 236–240.

13. Satire 2, v. 93-95, on-line translation by A. S. Kline.

14. Medicamina faciei femineae, 67–68.

15. Satire 6 , v. 463. Trans. by Susanna Morton Braund, Juvenal and Persius (Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 279.

16. Augustin Nadal (1659–1741) was a rival playwright of Voltaire who enjoyed little critical success.

17. Jaucourt wrote two articles on these women: Wardrobe reseller and Wardrobe merchant. – ed.

18. See also Jaucourt’s article Rouge (Cosmétique), where he explains that the snail purpura exudes a kind of strongly colored hot slime ( écume chaude ).

19. Groenlandaises , i.e. , Greenlandic Inuit women.

20. See note 10.

21. A tree of the Antilles with bright red seeds.

22. Montesquieu, Persian Letters (1721), letter L.

23. Fable entitled “La fille.”

24. Huile de talc was a concoction marketed by “charlatan” chemists ( Trévoux ) who sold it as “a marvelous makeup to preserve the complexion.”

25. Nostradamus (1503-1556), French astrologer and physician. His famous prophecies took the form of centuries , a centurie been an ensemble of one hundred quatrains. His Traité des fardements , was a book of apothecary, cosmetic, and culinary recipes.